First thoughts on Columbus. Columbus wasn’t looking for undiscovered continents. Columbus was trying to prove — from the practical, engineering standpoint — that the world was round. He did — and opened up a vast area for new human immigration on the way.
The east coast of North America was sparsely enough settled so you could say there was plenty of room for everyone — at least at first. Some numbers.
I’ve also heard there were 20 million were in the Midwest before the Spanish diseases wipe out 19 million. How many Americans live in the middle million square miles today. Seems unlikely heavily forested country could have supported 20 million hunter gatherers. Anybody? In any case, at down to one Native American per square mile there was plenty of room for everybody — especially for a much more advanced technological culture to exploit the natural resources …
… and share that technology. I believe we did that with the Cherokee before President Jackson death marched the tribe west.
Reports of Native Americans attacking European settlers without provocation to keep them out seem as numerous reports of the reverse. See Dances With Wolves?
South America seems to be where all the heavy genocide action was — South America where the gold was — and unlike California when we showed up there, tens of millions of indigenous people were available to be enslaved to mine it. Sub Saharan Africa took the same European gold-bite when indigenous South American slaves started to run low.
Can hardly blame Columbus for that. He wasn’t looking to discover gold, just expand horizons.
Could hardly leave two rich continents low tech while European masses lived in deep poverty. Anybody update me?
Conservatives are the real campus thought police squashing academic freedom
By George Ciccariello-Maher October 10 at 6:00 AM
George Ciccariello-Maher is a tenured associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University
Last week, I sent a string of relatively uncontroversial tweets in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre, in which I sought to answer a question about mass shootings in the United States: Why are these crimes almost always carried out by white men? “It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid,” I tweeted, before then diagnosing a sense of double entitlement — as white people and as men — that, when frustrated, can occasionally lead to violent consequences.
My argument was not new, but rather reflects decades of research on how race and gender function in our society. To be both white and male is to be subject to a potent cocktail of entitlement to economic and political power, and to dominate nonwhite and female bodies. When that entitlement is frustrated, it can lead to what the criminologist Mike King calls “aggrieved whiteness,” an ambient furor based on the idea that white Americans have become oppressed victims of politically correct multiculturalism.
In my view as a researcher and professor of politics, these tweets were neither provocative in tone nor controversial in content. Rather, the insight they provided felt all the more pressing now that President Trump has brought this aggrieved whiteness into daily headlines. As a scholar and teacher, giving context and depth to contemporary debates is an important part of what I do, and it’s a calling I take seriously. But more and more, professors like me are being targeted by a coordinated right-wing campaign to undermine our academic freedom — one that relies on misrepresentation and sometimes outright lying, and often puts us and our students in danger.
This time, the outrage machine geared up as it often does, with a minor conservative media outlet — in this case, the Daily Caller — chopping my tweets up into a misleading mishmash that transformed a nuanced diagnosis of white male frustration into an attack on white people in general. When the Daily Caller posted the article to Facebook, moreover, the intention was clearly to incite: “Absolutely unforgiveable” (sic) read the post, which by now has been shared nearly 2,000 times and commented upon more than 3,000 times.
Hate mail and death threats began to roll in. “I will beat your skull in till there is no tomorrow.” “Soon all you p‑‑‑‑‑s will get exactly what you deserve.” “Do the world a favor, and kill yourself … I’ll help you find death sooner than later.” One called me a “pig f‑‑‑er like Obama,” adding homophobic slurs for good measure. Many called me a “cuck” — a favorite racial and sexual insult of the alt-right — while others urged me to move to North Korea or Venezuela. One “love note from a WHITE American” wrongly identified me as a “greasy South American a‑‑hole.”
From there, the contagion was rapid, with Stephen Bannon’s Breitbart News and even Milo Yiannopoulos’s own website running their own cribbed copies of the same story. Then came FrontPage, the Blaze, the College Fix and the campus mercenaries at Turning Point. Soon, the manufactured story had hit the conspiratorial fringes of Infowars and online forums across the right: from “blue lives matter” to those preparing for the inevitable rapture.
Finally, the story crossed the mainstream-fringe barrier at its most permeable point: Fox News. Fox claimed that not only do I blame Trump for the Las Vegas massacre, but that I even somehow blame the victims. Threatening emails increased to a flood. An invitation to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show arrived in short order, only confirming the insular nature of the machine, which amplifies to a furious roar the same small group of voices. I declined.
I am by no means the first, and will not be the last target of this kind of smear campaign by conservatives aimed at academics. In every case, it is the same right-wing media outlets leading the charge, and campuses are increasingly the target. Universities and colleges have become the perfect target for such crusades: Purportedly hotbeds of multiculturalism, “safe spaces” and political correctness, campuses represent everything the resentful right is afraid of. At the same time that the right-wing media smears professors like myself, decrying our tenure and demanding our heads, they breathlessly chronicle the supposed intolerance of the left when confronted with provocative campus tours by Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and others.
And things aren’t letting up. While noteworthy cases such as Saida Grundy and Zandria Robinson in 2015 gave a glimpse of what was to come, the months since Trump’s election have seen a generalized assault on anti-racist academics. In May, Tommy Curry at Texas A&M was targeted for a years-old podcast; Princeton’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor was forced to cancel public events after threats following a commencement speech; and Johnny Eric Williams at Trinity College was targeted and suspended reposting someone else’s words on Facebook. Increasingly, leftist professors are being targeted for “things they never really said.” As Princeton’s Eddie Glaude has put it, when the right is so easily triggered by anti-racism and feminism, they make it perfectly clear who the “real snowflakes” are.
Caught in this wave of right-wing threats and provocations, many universities are scrambling to keep up with the coordinated onslaught. In the best of cases, university administrations and departments have publicly condemned threats against faculty and made clear that they do not cave to intimidation campaigns. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has even responded to our cases with new guidelines urging universities to resist the targeted online harassment of their faculty.
In response to such illegal threats of violence, Drexel has chosen to place me on administrative leave. Earlier in the week, I asked my students to explain the relation between white masculinity and mass killings, and they offered in a few short minutes of class discussion far more insight than any mainstream media outlet has offered all week. But now, their own academic freedom has been curtailed by their university, and they are unable to even attend the classes they registered for.
By bowing to pressure from racist internet trolls, Drexel has sent the wrong signal: That you can control a university’s curriculum with anonymous threats of violence. Such cowardice notwithstanding, I am prepared to take all necessary legal action to protect my academic freedom, tenure rights and most importantly, the rights of my students to learn in a safe environment where threats don’t hold sway over intellectual debate. Alongside organizations like the Campus Antifascist Network, I will continue to challenge white supremacists in an effort to make Drexel and all universities safe space for an intellectual debate among equals”
“Conservatives are the real campus thought police squashing academic freedom”
and as he stated:
“On Christmas Eve, I sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, ‘white genocide,'” he said in an e-mail. ‘For those who haven’t bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.”
“White Genocide” is a term coined by white supremacists for propaganda purposes as shorthand for one of the most deeply held modern white supremacist convictions: that the white race is “dying” due to growing non-white populations and “forced assimilation,” all of which are deliberately engineered and controlled by a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the white race. This same conviction can be seen in the so-called “14 Words” slogan, the most popular white supremacist slogan around the globe: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” White supremacists commonly claim that they must take action, even violent action, or the “white race” will “perish from the Earth.”
Re Dennis Drew on native americans, The natives in the midwest left the remains now called the mound builder civilization which was well beyond the hunter gatherer stage. The actually grew the same corn that grew in MX (Not suprisingly in what is now the corn belt) Mound Builder remains stretch at least from Ms up to IL and over to OH. Other tribes native copper on Isle Royale. So perhaps the coastal tribes were hunter gatherers but the folks in the Midwest were definitely not. Nor in fact were the folks that built the Chaco Canyon civilization in NM (which ended a couple of centuries before Columbus due to drought). The Chaco civilization stretched over 200 miles and had roads. It is thought that parts of these tribes ended up in Mesa Verde, whose cliff dwellings are not those of hunter gatherers, nor the Pueblo tribes of NM
A bit more on the mound builders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_Builders Note the article states that only the groups at 3500 bce were at the hunter gathered level. The largest cities of the latter phases were up to 20k population in size, So at least comparable to the early cities in Iraq.
Lyle, what I’m looking for (and hope to be informed here; thanks) is numbers — as in millions. I really don’t know anything about how much genocide was committed against Native Americans — or what attempts vica versa. But, I don’t think keeping Europe’s “huddled masses” and their more advanced technology out of what seems to me a relatively empty North America is the moral option. How morally Europeans went about it another story — humans tend to be treacherous (on all sides). Especially, historically, Europeans against Europeans.
So all that still leaves explorer Columbus a great hero. Genocide, if it happened across the board — if the Indians were not mostly out competed economically and technologically — is a separate issue.
Columbus wasn’t trying to prove that the world was round, he was trying to prove that there was a navigable Western route from Europe to the Indian trade regions.
The approximate roundness of the Earth has not been a reasonable question among those thinking about it for more than two thousand years. The question has been just how large the Earth is, and whether there was another landmass across the Atlantic.
Columbus thought it was considerably smaller than it is.
Just a brief note: Columbus day is only celebrated in the US I believe so we can focus mostly on what happened here — which (another thought) would have happened whether or not there were indigenous people here.
Seems all Indians, north and south, are all from a single genetic line — meaning no way for DNA to differentiate different tribes — whatever the phony TV ads say.
I just ordered on my KIndle:
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes
by Adam Rutherford (Author), Siddhartha Mukherjee
Maybe I’ll pick up some Native American population info from that.
Just read through the Atlantic article. The quality is not very good.
While it’s certainly true that the genetics of any admixed person and within most tribes wouldn’t definitively place you in one or another in most of the native groups in the Americas, there are larger autosomal DNA groups and deviations between haplogroups. The far northern people (Yupik, Inupiak, Greenland Inuit, and related Aneut) are certainly more similar to one another (regardless of the continent they are on) than they are to the other pre-european populations.
The casual assertion late in the article that “reparation rights afforded to tribes in recent years might be invalid” is complete bullshit. Compacts and contracts are political and legal documents.
The book may do a better job than the article adaptation, but I doubt it really gets into the social nitty-gritty of issues like the “civilized” tribes of what is now the United States, which were slaveholding (with all the related complexities noted in passing in the article), and the specifics of admixture regionally.
Ultimately it all comes down to culture though, and without reading the book it’s hard to see from this article where the author comes down on the issue. There’s a movement in history that takes the position that a lot of historical “ethnic groups” are really cultural groups. If your “neighborhood” professed to be and acted like a member of that group, then you were a member of that group, regardless of the underlying genetics.
Haplogroups etc are interesting markers that can tell us about the “plate tectonics” of migrations etc, but they don’t tell us much of anything about the people and their interactions with other cultural groups.
According to this article:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.1330770302/abstract From the American Journal of Physical Anthropology the native american population in North America was around 2 million in 1500. Various studies show an up to 90% drop by 1800, largely due to new germs and viruses imported from the old world including smallpox. Of course any population figures for 1500 in particular for North America are educated guesses at best. The leading mound builder town in IL had between 10, and 20k which meant it was the historically largest city in North America until 1750.
Of course a lot of information post dates when the text books used in school were written.
Note this article suggests 37 million folks in Mexico and Peru and Brazil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas
It also claims between 2.1 to 7 million with an outlier of 18 million for North America.
These numbers are being refined thru genetic studies. But just for reference the population of the us in 1860 was about 30 million, 17 million in 1840, 9.6 million in 1820.
Lyle,
So what it all boils down to for me is that hundreds of millions of people from poverty and war ravaged Europe found a better home on a relatively population poor and very resource rich North American continent (this started with Columbus day which is only celebrated in US I think). Whether the Indians were maltreated along the way (or how much — doesn’t seem to be mostly massive — “fallen” human nature always expects some of this) or not the same 330 million people would be here today.
So Columbus amounts to a “right stuff” historical navigator who gets credit for being the first to hook up Europe’s (and later Asia’s) huddled masses with a more hopeful continent. Columbus did not arrive with hordes like Attila — he was just doing his sea gig.
Ed,
I’m talking intentionally attacked — 40-80% of North America’s appox 8 million Indians died off via European diseases according the same Wiki that Lyle links to — leaving less than two per square mile in US borders. In any case Columbus was not responsible. It’s not like if he didn’t find this place nobody would have. Great historical navigator — found a lightly populated, resource rich continent (or two) for Europe’s teeming masses. Not like we moved in on China or India.
The Europeans were just finishing off killing off tens of millions of each other as I was born. Pretty much the story of Indian wars with each other. Can’t keep the continent empty when it’s so badly needed because humans are going to keep up their inhumanity everywhere. There was no cold-blooded mass genocide that I know of.
First thoughts on Columbus. Columbus wasn’t looking for undiscovered continents. Columbus was trying to prove — from the practical, engineering standpoint — that the world was round. He did — and opened up a vast area for new human immigration on the way.
The east coast of North America was sparsely enough settled so you could say there was plenty of room for everyone — at least at first. Some numbers.
Total population of 13 states, 1989: 4 million.
Native American population within expanding US borders: 1789, 76,000;
1853, 400,000; 1890, 218,000. Most of losses due to exposure to European diseases (especially Spanish) I think.
https://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/native-american-census-before-1850.htm
I’ve also heard there were 20 million were in the Midwest before the Spanish diseases wipe out 19 million. How many Americans live in the middle million square miles today. Seems unlikely heavily forested country could have supported 20 million hunter gatherers. Anybody? In any case, at down to one Native American per square mile there was plenty of room for everybody — especially for a much more advanced technological culture to exploit the natural resources …
… and share that technology. I believe we did that with the Cherokee before President Jackson death marched the tribe west.
Reports of Native Americans attacking European settlers without provocation to keep them out seem as numerous reports of the reverse. See Dances With Wolves?
South America seems to be where all the heavy genocide action was — South America where the gold was — and unlike California when we showed up there, tens of millions of indigenous people were available to be enslaved to mine it. Sub Saharan Africa took the same European gold-bite when indigenous South American slaves started to run low.
Can hardly blame Columbus for that. He wasn’t looking to discover gold, just expand horizons.
Could hardly leave two rich continents low tech while European masses lived in deep poverty. Anybody update me?
Conservatives are the real campus thought police squashing academic freedom
By George Ciccariello-Maher October 10 at 6:00 AM
George Ciccariello-Maher is a tenured associate professor of politics and global studies at Drexel University
Last week, I sent a string of relatively uncontroversial tweets in the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre, in which I sought to answer a question about mass shootings in the United States: Why are these crimes almost always carried out by white men? “It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid,” I tweeted, before then diagnosing a sense of double entitlement — as white people and as men — that, when frustrated, can occasionally lead to violent consequences.
My argument was not new, but rather reflects decades of research on how race and gender function in our society. To be both white and male is to be subject to a potent cocktail of entitlement to economic and political power, and to dominate nonwhite and female bodies. When that entitlement is frustrated, it can lead to what the criminologist Mike King calls “aggrieved whiteness,” an ambient furor based on the idea that white Americans have become oppressed victims of politically correct multiculturalism.
In my view as a researcher and professor of politics, these tweets were neither provocative in tone nor controversial in content. Rather, the insight they provided felt all the more pressing now that President Trump has brought this aggrieved whiteness into daily headlines. As a scholar and teacher, giving context and depth to contemporary debates is an important part of what I do, and it’s a calling I take seriously. But more and more, professors like me are being targeted by a coordinated right-wing campaign to undermine our academic freedom — one that relies on misrepresentation and sometimes outright lying, and often puts us and our students in danger.
This time, the outrage machine geared up as it often does, with a minor conservative media outlet — in this case, the Daily Caller — chopping my tweets up into a misleading mishmash that transformed a nuanced diagnosis of white male frustration into an attack on white people in general. When the Daily Caller posted the article to Facebook, moreover, the intention was clearly to incite: “Absolutely unforgiveable” (sic) read the post, which by now has been shared nearly 2,000 times and commented upon more than 3,000 times.
Hate mail and death threats began to roll in. “I will beat your skull in till there is no tomorrow.” “Soon all you p‑‑‑‑‑s will get exactly what you deserve.” “Do the world a favor, and kill yourself … I’ll help you find death sooner than later.” One called me a “pig f‑‑‑er like Obama,” adding homophobic slurs for good measure. Many called me a “cuck” — a favorite racial and sexual insult of the alt-right — while others urged me to move to North Korea or Venezuela. One “love note from a WHITE American” wrongly identified me as a “greasy South American a‑‑hole.”
From there, the contagion was rapid, with Stephen Bannon’s Breitbart News and even Milo Yiannopoulos’s own website running their own cribbed copies of the same story. Then came FrontPage, the Blaze, the College Fix and the campus mercenaries at Turning Point. Soon, the manufactured story had hit the conspiratorial fringes of Infowars and online forums across the right: from “blue lives matter” to those preparing for the inevitable rapture.
Finally, the story crossed the mainstream-fringe barrier at its most permeable point: Fox News. Fox claimed that not only do I blame Trump for the Las Vegas massacre, but that I even somehow blame the victims. Threatening emails increased to a flood. An invitation to appear on Tucker Carlson’s show arrived in short order, only confirming the insular nature of the machine, which amplifies to a furious roar the same small group of voices. I declined.
I am by no means the first, and will not be the last target of this kind of smear campaign by conservatives aimed at academics. In every case, it is the same right-wing media outlets leading the charge, and campuses are increasingly the target. Universities and colleges have become the perfect target for such crusades: Purportedly hotbeds of multiculturalism, “safe spaces” and political correctness, campuses represent everything the resentful right is afraid of. At the same time that the right-wing media smears professors like myself, decrying our tenure and demanding our heads, they breathlessly chronicle the supposed intolerance of the left when confronted with provocative campus tours by Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Charles Murray, Ann Coulter and others.
And things aren’t letting up. While noteworthy cases such as Saida Grundy and Zandria Robinson in 2015 gave a glimpse of what was to come, the months since Trump’s election have seen a generalized assault on anti-racist academics. In May, Tommy Curry at Texas A&M was targeted for a years-old podcast; Princeton’s Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor was forced to cancel public events after threats following a commencement speech; and Johnny Eric Williams at Trinity College was targeted and suspended reposting someone else’s words on Facebook. Increasingly, leftist professors are being targeted for “things they never really said.” As Princeton’s Eddie Glaude has put it, when the right is so easily triggered by anti-racism and feminism, they make it perfectly clear who the “real snowflakes” are.
Caught in this wave of right-wing threats and provocations, many universities are scrambling to keep up with the coordinated onslaught. In the best of cases, university administrations and departments have publicly condemned threats against faculty and made clear that they do not cave to intimidation campaigns. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has even responded to our cases with new guidelines urging universities to resist the targeted online harassment of their faculty.
In response to such illegal threats of violence, Drexel has chosen to place me on administrative leave. Earlier in the week, I asked my students to explain the relation between white masculinity and mass killings, and they offered in a few short minutes of class discussion far more insight than any mainstream media outlet has offered all week. But now, their own academic freedom has been curtailed by their university, and they are unable to even attend the classes they registered for.
By bowing to pressure from racist internet trolls, Drexel has sent the wrong signal: That you can control a university’s curriculum with anonymous threats of violence. Such cowardice notwithstanding, I am prepared to take all necessary legal action to protect my academic freedom, tenure rights and most importantly, the rights of my students to learn in a safe environment where threats don’t hold sway over intellectual debate. Alongside organizations like the Campus Antifascist Network, I will continue to challenge white supremacists in an effort to make Drexel and all universities safe space for an intellectual debate among equals”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/10/10/conservatives-are-the-real-campus-thought-police-squashing-academic-freedom/?utm_term=.e97ac6bdd302
This is the same guy that tweeted “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide”
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/Drexel-officials-Professor-George-Ciccariello-Mahers-White-Genocide-tweet-was-utterly-reprehensible.html
If the prof had inserted “black” for “white” in both tweets, he would have received the same vitriol, and been fired.
As he states,
“Conservatives are the real campus thought police squashing academic freedom”
and as he stated:
“On Christmas Eve, I sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, ‘white genocide,'” he said in an e-mail. ‘For those who haven’t bothered to do their research, ‘white genocide’ is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.”
“White Genocide” is a term coined by white supremacists for propaganda purposes as shorthand for one of the most deeply held modern white supremacist convictions: that the white race is “dying” due to growing non-white populations and “forced assimilation,” all of which are deliberately engineered and controlled by a Jewish conspiracy to destroy the white race. This same conviction can be seen in the so-called “14 Words” slogan, the most popular white supremacist slogan around the globe: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” White supremacists commonly claim that they must take action, even violent action, or the “white race” will “perish from the Earth.”
https://www.adl.org/education/resources/glossary-terms/white-genocide
Re Dennis Drew on native americans, The natives in the midwest left the remains now called the mound builder civilization which was well beyond the hunter gatherer stage. The actually grew the same corn that grew in MX (Not suprisingly in what is now the corn belt) Mound Builder remains stretch at least from Ms up to IL and over to OH. Other tribes native copper on Isle Royale. So perhaps the coastal tribes were hunter gatherers but the folks in the Midwest were definitely not. Nor in fact were the folks that built the Chaco Canyon civilization in NM (which ended a couple of centuries before Columbus due to drought). The Chaco civilization stretched over 200 miles and had roads. It is thought that parts of these tribes ended up in Mesa Verde, whose cliff dwellings are not those of hunter gatherers, nor the Pueblo tribes of NM
A bit more on the mound builders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mound_Builders Note the article states that only the groups at 3500 bce were at the hunter gathered level. The largest cities of the latter phases were up to 20k population in size, So at least comparable to the early cities in Iraq.
Lyle, what I’m looking for (and hope to be informed here; thanks) is numbers — as in millions. I really don’t know anything about how much genocide was committed against Native Americans — or what attempts vica versa. But, I don’t think keeping Europe’s “huddled masses” and their more advanced technology out of what seems to me a relatively empty North America is the moral option. How morally Europeans went about it another story — humans tend to be treacherous (on all sides). Especially, historically, Europeans against Europeans.
So all that still leaves explorer Columbus a great hero. Genocide, if it happened across the board — if the Indians were not mostly out competed economically and technologically — is a separate issue.
Columbus wasn’t trying to prove that the world was round, he was trying to prove that there was a navigable Western route from Europe to the Indian trade regions.
JG, yeah,
And as for the real reason look to Bill Maher, who said when Queen Isabella suggested he just find a better route through the middle east said:
“I’d rather sail off the end of the fen earth than talk to those people one more time.”
We should have done the same.
The approximate roundness of the Earth has not been a reasonable question among those thinking about it for more than two thousand years. The question has been just how large the Earth is, and whether there was another landmass across the Atlantic.
Columbus thought it was considerably smaller than it is.
I said: “from the practical, engineering standpoint.” Just a figure of speech. 🙂
“On Christmas Eve, I sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, ‘white genocide”
There are only two words in the phrase: 1) white 2) genocide. The meaning is clear.
The dude is a moron. Free speech yes. Reap what you sow, also yes.
Just a brief note: Columbus day is only celebrated in the US I believe so we can focus mostly on what happened here — which (another thought) would have happened whether or not there were indigenous people here.
I just read A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas, The miracle of modern genetics has revolutionized the story anthropologists tell about how humans spread out across the Earth.
Adam Rutherford Oct 3, 2017
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/a-brief-history-of-everyone-who-ever-lived/537942/?utm_source=New+Daily+Newsletter+Subscribers&utm_campaign=3fffc29f84-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_10_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4675a5c15f-3fffc29f84-81758137
Seems all Indians, north and south, are all from a single genetic line — meaning no way for DNA to differentiate different tribes — whatever the phony TV ads say.
I just ordered on my KIndle:
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes
by Adam Rutherford (Author), Siddhartha Mukherjee
Maybe I’ll pick up some Native American population info from that.
Sammy,
The “meaning” of the two words was not his creation, but the creation of white supremacists.
BTW, nice how you diagram how to use a sound byte.
Just read through the Atlantic article. The quality is not very good.
While it’s certainly true that the genetics of any admixed person and within most tribes wouldn’t definitively place you in one or another in most of the native groups in the Americas, there are larger autosomal DNA groups and deviations between haplogroups. The far northern people (Yupik, Inupiak, Greenland Inuit, and related Aneut) are certainly more similar to one another (regardless of the continent they are on) than they are to the other pre-european populations.
The casual assertion late in the article that “reparation rights afforded to tribes in recent years might be invalid” is complete bullshit. Compacts and contracts are political and legal documents.
The book may do a better job than the article adaptation, but I doubt it really gets into the social nitty-gritty of issues like the “civilized” tribes of what is now the United States, which were slaveholding (with all the related complexities noted in passing in the article), and the specifics of admixture regionally.
Ultimately it all comes down to culture though, and without reading the book it’s hard to see from this article where the author comes down on the issue. There’s a movement in history that takes the position that a lot of historical “ethnic groups” are really cultural groups. If your “neighborhood” professed to be and acted like a member of that group, then you were a member of that group, regardless of the underlying genetics.
Haplogroups etc are interesting markers that can tell us about the “plate tectonics” of migrations etc, but they don’t tell us much of anything about the people and their interactions with other cultural groups.
According to this article:http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.1330770302/abstract From the American Journal of Physical Anthropology the native american population in North America was around 2 million in 1500. Various studies show an up to 90% drop by 1800, largely due to new germs and viruses imported from the old world including smallpox. Of course any population figures for 1500 in particular for North America are educated guesses at best. The leading mound builder town in IL had between 10, and 20k which meant it was the historically largest city in North America until 1750.
Of course a lot of information post dates when the text books used in school were written.
Note this article suggests 37 million folks in Mexico and Peru and Brazil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas
It also claims between 2.1 to 7 million with an outlier of 18 million for North America.
These numbers are being refined thru genetic studies. But just for reference the population of the us in 1860 was about 30 million, 17 million in 1840, 9.6 million in 1820.
Lyle,
So what it all boils down to for me is that hundreds of millions of people from poverty and war ravaged Europe found a better home on a relatively population poor and very resource rich North American continent (this started with Columbus day which is only celebrated in US I think). Whether the Indians were maltreated along the way (or how much — doesn’t seem to be mostly massive — “fallen” human nature always expects some of this) or not the same 330 million people would be here today.
So Columbus amounts to a “right stuff” historical navigator who gets credit for being the first to hook up Europe’s (and later Asia’s) huddled masses with a more hopeful continent. Columbus did not arrive with hordes like Attila — he was just doing his sea gig.
DD,
A 90% loss of population is not “massive”?
At what level does it become “massive”?
Ed,
I’m talking intentionally attacked — 40-80% of North America’s appox 8 million Indians died off via European diseases according the same Wiki that Lyle links to — leaving less than two per square mile in US borders. In any case Columbus was not responsible. It’s not like if he didn’t find this place nobody would have. Great historical navigator — found a lightly populated, resource rich continent (or two) for Europe’s teeming masses. Not like we moved in on China or India.
The Europeans were just finishing off killing off tens of millions of each other as I was born. Pretty much the story of Indian wars with each other. Can’t keep the continent empty when it’s so badly needed because humans are going to keep up their inhumanity everywhere. There was no cold-blooded mass genocide that I know of.